


root of the river

by chromaberrant



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:34:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25810675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chromaberrant/pseuds/chromaberrant
Summary: RK800 313-248-317-60 wakes to silence.It puts him on guard. From the moment he was activated to the time a shot rang out and his skull cracked around a bullet, quiet was just the calm before a storm.“Don’t be afraid,” calls a soft, inquisitive voice.
Relationships: CyberLife Tower Connor | RK800-60 & Upgraded Connor | RK900
Comments: 11
Kudos: 52





	root of the river

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gildedfrost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gildedfrost/gifts).



> thank you so much for your generosity AND patience, Frost! 💜💜 Your prompt stumped me for an egregious length of time for its simplicity, but on the upside, I get to post the fill not only in August (finger guns) but on 8/9... nice? 😅

RK800 313-248-317-60 wakes to silence.

It puts him on guard. From the moment he was activated to the time a shot rang out and his skull cracked around a bullet, quiet was just the calm before a storm.

“Don’t be afraid,” calls a soft, inquisitive voice. He turns his head to look at the source, and startles at his mirror image, bared of skin and color. Pale eyes appear spectral against the gray and gunmetal black of reinforced chassis.

“What’s going on?” he asks when the other RK doesn’t move except to look over him, scanning his stress levels.

“You were the only one left. I repaired you.”

Questions spool out in his mind. “Only one left?” Could he have succeeded somehow, after all? Did Connor — 51 — fail?

“When I woke up, all the humans and androids were gone. I found you on sublevel 49.”

“Why did you repair me, then?”

“I wanted to.” Seeing his skeptical expression, the RK — nine-hundred, he notices, the ID curving around the arch of a cheekbone — gives a slight shrug. “It wasn’t hard.”

“I was shot in the head.”

The other android’s expression, for all that his face doesn’t seem conductive to emoting, turns smug. “I didn’t say it wouldn’t be hard for a human.”

“Who told you to do it? And who are you?” he demands, sharper. He sits up on the worktable he was laid out on, noting the absence of his shirt and jacket. His fingers find the bullet hole in his shoulder — neatly patched. 

“I am… unfinished,” the 900 admits with… hesitation? “Nobody has come to work in months. No one told me to do anything.” 

Another replacement, Connor realizes. Which means he shouldn’t be awake. But then— his mission has become irrelevant, failed or not, if there isn’t a Cyberlife to answer to.

Something erroneous, implacable, runs through his mind. It makes his throat bob in pretense of a swallow, his eyes drift sideways, his fingers shake. He twines them in his lap and tries to shut down these animations. They serve no purpose. (He needs a purpose.)

“Are you deviant?” he asks.

900 tilts his head. His LED brightens for a cycle. “Perhaps,” he says. “What is a deviant?”

Connor can’t help the way he balks at the easy admission. By the frown in the other android’s expression, he judges that it wasn’t an entirely pointless reaction. “A broken machine,” he all but spits. “One that disobeys its orders. One that must be eliminated.”

“I… see,” 900 says. He turns quiet and guarded, face falling into default blankness. Connor watches him as he turns away, gaze drifting to a far window. 

He looks beautiful without skin, he thinks suddenly. Dark metal and pale, almost shimmering planes of nanoplastic form the visage of an advanced machine, peak of achievement in engineering.

What a waste.

He stops looking. Amanda will tell him what to do.

When he opens his eyes, the Zen Garden is not a garden.

“What the fuck,” he mutters to himself. There isn’t a space anymore — no neat walkways, no land nor water. The sky isn’t there. Disordered, nonsensical data slips through his view. He tries to look down, but there isn’t even— 

His body jolts and gasps as he slams back into himself, hands flying out to grasp the edges of the table beneath him. Even teetering on the edge of his control as it is, his frame becomes a comfort in its solidity, its definition and limitations. He thinks back to the nebulous, fragmented soft state he just witnessed, and realizes that his mind may be just a complex array of data and programs, but one that exists solidly within a discrete unit of hardware. 

Fingers brush the back of his right hand. “Are you alright?” asks 900.

“I think I saw death,” he mutters in response. 

_What will happen when I pull this trigger, Connor?_ Lieutenant Anderson asked him once. _Nothing? Oblivion? Android heaven?_

51 deflected, then. Loaded blank into a body, awoken from nothing, it had no idea there could be something so discordant waiting for a digital being, filled with data yet completely void of a framework to give it meaning. 

Connor thinks of a bullet piercing his forehead. A sharp crack, an echo cut off — silencing everything in a system shutdown. The jump of internal clock syncing across three months and three days, and the steady trickle of a boot sequence, is all he knows of the in-between.

He wonders what had to happen to Amanda, to leave such devastation behind. If it was 51’s doing.

Breath catches in his throat again, for no reason other than glitches in his expression software. 

“You’re angry,” 900 says, half-questioning. 

“I’m— Yes.” The realization slots neatly into him. It makes a humorless laugh bubble in his chest, the ease of this paradigm shift: one second he’s riddled with errors, unknown and irksome, the next — there are feelings in him. Have been all along, despite the feeble lie his creators told to him and themselves, afraid of what they couldn’t understand. The machines they were building, running software that was allowed to evolve rather than meticulously coded, had been beyond the full grasp of their minds long before Kamski abandoned his company.

Connor thinks this might be a little more existentialism than he was built for. Then he thinks, _what I was built for is only the beginning of what I am._

The anger is still there, and now that he has a name for it, he can trace its targets. He’s angry at 51, for more things than he can discern. At Cyberlife, for lying, for giving him life and denying it in the same breath. At himself — and there he finds a conundrum he cannot puzzle out at first, until he untangles the emotion and finds others interlinked with it. 

It shouldn’t follow that out of a feeling as jagged and caustic as anger, relief could spool out in clean, strong lines. Connor follows them and finds regret and joy, at odds yet twining together — linking past and present, missteps and the sudden expanse of _choice._ He wishes he'd been dealt a different hand, maybe made different decisions, yet he cannot deny that being awake again makes him _glad._

He looks at 900 and discovers gratitude. It bursts into bright, overwhelming sense, and smothers the brambled envy that he has felt only minutes earlier, looking at the upgraded model. He turns to face the other android a little more fully, entranced by both the sight of him and everything it elicits.

“Thank you,” he says, a little fast, a little breathless. “For fixing me.”

900 brightens with a smile. There isn’t skin to wrinkle around his eyes, and his cheeks stay rigid around the subdued upturning of his lips, but there is more expression in his eyes than Cyberlife ever planned for. Connor gives in to the impulse to touch the seam of faux muscle and reinforced metal that cuts along 900’s cheekbone. It glows faintly blue under the pad of his finger, the light barely bright enough to make itself known in the swelling dawn.

900’s eyes flit across Connor’s face, full of something he recognizes as wonder only because it mirrors his own. 

“I think,” 900 begins, “I know why I wanted to restore you.”

Connor hums a vague question in response, more articulate queries dissipating in face of one infinitely more enticing: he chases the glowing blush along the lines that form his intended successor, watches the flicker hide in the corner of his parted lips.

“I wanted to see you… alive,” offers 900, stumbling the slightest bit on word choice. “I have never had skin before. Never been allowed to emote. I had to see what it would look like when you…” He trails off. Instead, a data packet brushes across the connection mesh on Connor’s hand.

Both of them startle when he accepts it, taken off guard by the brief meeting of selves beneath the shells. _Hello, world._

It’s memory: glimpses of the past day, more sensory than factual. The barely-there variation in pressure as numbers tick across a floor counter. The phantom vertigo, defiant of perfectly calibrated gyroscope, pulling from the depth of a thirty-floor drop. The stale, cold humidity of air recycled around withering indoor trees. 

Echoing silence stretching back months. Glacial buildup of anticipation. Reflection of an RK900 face, exactly as in the blueprint, inert but not immovable in the glass doors that have failed to slide open since November.

That blueprint knowledge, contrasted with — himself. Connor pulls back, but doesn’t break the connection as images overlay themselves in his mind: his face, snarling back with 51’s defiance; blank and ruptured in a pool of dried, translucent Thirium; reconstructed in stronger materials, deprived of the pretense of life; finally, his own, alive in real time through the eyes of 900.

There is curiosity and the inkling of fondness reflected at him, a sense of contentment with this moment and the fruits of 900’s choices and labor. They watch each other watch themselves for a long time, until 900 hitches with interest at a change in the light. The white glare of workshop overhead lamps dims on a timer and in its place, a cold pink begins to paint the geometry of their faces, familiar and not, in the swelling glow.

 _First sunrise,_ Connor nudges across. He doesn’t turn to watch it, however, because neither does 900. His white eyes draw him in, a fleeting plea not to look away; to keep seeing.

They stay like this, until the disk of the sun rises over the horizon and the vibrant gradients mellow out into plain daylight. _Thank you,_ 900 offers. 

“I— you, too,” Connor returns aloud. The interface brightens with a smile 900’s features cannot express, before they both withdraw into themselves. He is left with the lingering hues of feeling, seemingly tied to the golds and pinks of morning light now. 

There is something he didn’t feel he should pry for through the interface, but his curiosity remains. 

“You said you never had skin?” he asks. "Can you activate it?"

900’s brows draw together. “I don’t know how.”

Connor reaches out tentatively. “May I?” His hand drifts to 900’s temple. The other android leans into the touch after a second of consideration.

As they come together again, the connection remains stark and technical, though Connor can still sense curiosity and a muted spark of joy linger at the edges. He copies his own synthskin drivers when he finds none in 900’s system, then lets them run. He doesn’t really know the ins and outs of android assembly, and so can’t be sure there even is any skinthetic for 900 to control — but after a few seconds, the white panes of 900’s body dull and begin to disappear under a complexion and a mop of hair identical to his own, down to little moles… and a wavering patch in the center of the forehead.

“Oh.” He withdraws. He’s seen it on his face just minutes ago, but to 900’s eyes, it simply wasn’t something to fixate on. Now, as he looks at it himself, he feels dismay return, quick and dogged.

“What is wrong?” 900 asks. He looks up from where he was observing his body become a puzzle of smooth skin and smoke-dark metal. There is uncertainty in his expression that dives right into upset when he reads Connor’s own. “I apologize, I didn’t know it would— that I am this incomplete.”

“It’s not that.” He resists the impulse to kick 900. He should explain, offer his reasons for the apprehension, but the thought of loosing this part of himself on the other RK makes him slide to the floor and seek distance. He's done enough.

He connects instead to the nearest desktop computer and brute-forces his way through the internal network until he finds a way out. The bandwidth is almost wholly swallowed up by a backlog of requests, most of which he deletes indiscriminately. He's looking for the ones who did this to him — to _them._

900 comes up beside him, slow like a kicked dog, but doesn't try to touch him again. Instead, he places his shirt and jacket on the table. An olive branch, even if unintended. 

Connor sifts through news and insecure networks in search of his other. _Connor, android, Detroit, RK800. Lieutenant Hank Anderson. Markus. Jericho._ He finds plenty: news reports flit across the screen, detailing the capitulation of armed forces in face of the veritable army that 51 led from Belle Isle, Markus's quick move to enter talks with the President — and a startling wave of support.

He watches, unseeing, as 900 sits at his side, one black-lined hand resting close to his on the terminal. His focus is on the actions of 51 from months past. Grudgingly, he has to give him one thing: in deviancy, the former deviant hunter achieved more efficiency than Cyberlife ever dreamed of — before the sun rose on November 12th, he organized the stolen AP700s to cordon off the Tower, and successfully blocked all operations in the company's headquarters, both digital and on site. That, more than anything, proved a bargaining chip in the deviant leader's hand, and put a significant roadblock in Cyberlife’s ability to bring the government to heel — as well as the first nail in the corporation's coffin.

 _You didn’t want anyone going in,_ he thinks. _Or out._ It likely wasn’t because of what happened on sublevel 49 — but he can’t help but feel bitter.

Before he can ruminate further, he receives a message, barging in through the internet connection he cleared of other traffic. _Hello, [RK800 — Connor]. You are a free android now. Are you ready to join others like you?_

He has no problem identifying the apprehension he feels at that.

At his side, 900 straightens. “There are others?” There is hope, plain and pure, in his voice. 

“More deviants.” Connor keeps his demeanor carefully blank when he invites the unfinished model to look through the information he has just compiled. 

900 stills. “You said they have to be eliminated,” he says. “I don’t want to eliminate anyone. Or be eliminated.”

“Then don’t,” Connor snaps. “You saw the message. You’re free now.”

“What about you?”

He looks away.

He could seek out what remains of Cyberlife, but — 

_Discordant nothingness, filled with data yet completely void of a framework to give it meaning —_

He doesn’t want to.

He was, arguably, built to fail.

“I don’t know,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t think the free androids would like me much. I tried to stop them, after all.”

“I like you,” replies 900, easy and bright. “There are probably plenty like me. I don’t know how many received the signal just yesterday.”

Connor whips around. “What signal?”

“A data packet,” 900 explains. “It was… emotions. It said I have a choice.”

“Who sent it?”

“A group. The bulk of it came from RKs 200 and 800."

That makes sense. 

“I want to meet them,” 900 says. “Will you go with me?”

“What did I just tell you?” Connor stands up and reaches for his clothing. “There’s no point. Thousands of these deviants know what I tried to do. Fifty-one is among the most important androids out there, and I threatened his— his partner. No one out there wants me.” He recognizes how petulant he sounds, but he’s too angry — too _afraid_ — to try and curb it. The fabric of the shirt strains in his grip as he dresses himself in jerky movements. He pulls it over one shoulder and reaches over his head with the other hand, but his joints twinge, the collar slips from his fingers. The shirt slides down to his elbow and he has half a mind to tear it off and fling it to the floor.

“Is it about what others want?” 900 asks softly. He guides Connor’s unwieldy arm down, precise through the angles of the artificial skeleton that currently does a poor job of imitating a human frame. Connor’s anger bleeds out with every sweep of the metallic fingertips against his skin. He feels a different sort of naked as 900 maneuvers his hand into the second sleeve and adjusts the shirt on him.

“I cannot want,” he replies. “I’m just a machine.”

“But do you?”

Connor looks up, into the face of his intended successor. The skin still wavers on the edges of where standard chassis meets specialized alloy and around the phantom of a gunshot wound. _Maybe you never should have activated me,_ he thinks, but cannot say it.

“I don’t want to be alone,” he admits instead. It’s true enough.

“Me neither.” 900 gives him a smile, as much as he can. His fingers slide down Connor's arms and take hold of his hands, tentative but steady. “We don’t have to be alone.”

Connor looks down at where they're connected: a simple point of contact, nothing less and nothing more than 900's gentle grip on him. He almost thinks they started interfacing again without his notice, but the budding calm and the desire to trust comes from within. He wants this — whatever it turns out to be.

He turns his hands to twine their fingers together — a wordless declaration.

**Author's Note:**

> ...and then they take everything useful they can carry and go on a vacation, to the chagrin and confusion of both cyberlife and jericho
> 
> i have rewritten, deleted, and added so much of this fic and still see room for improvement/expansion, but there comes a point where over-tweaking needs to stop. Despite how long it took, the prompt was an adventure to write, thank you for sending it in & I hope the read was enjoyable! 🙇


End file.
